At seven-thirty on the morning after the Grand Coronation, the rim of the ten-mile central crater in the heart of Dry-Well Capital was bustling like a county market on festival day!
Two days ago, when Pei Xuan and his two billion citizens had pulled the two-mile-wide Upper-Realm Spirit-Draining Nail out of the earth and launched it back into the sky, the earth-shaking shockwave had cleared away ten thousand years of deep red bedrock beneath the original site of Dry-Well Village.
Rising from the bottom of that ten-mile-wide circular pit—directly beneath the golden aqueducts of the Sweet-Spring Well—was a colossal, ancient ring forged from dark gray star-stone!
It was ten miles across, covered in deep, weathered carvings of stars, constellations, and coiling dragons, and its upper arch rose higher than the morning clouds:
The Ancient Planetary Star-Gate of Canglan!
Overnight, five thousand Rank 6 Star-Bronze Golems and fifty thousand Frost-Giant workers had built wide stone viewing terraces, heated staging depots, and supply yards all around the upper rim of the ten-mile crater, complete with twenty-four automatic registration turnstiles, glowing star-chart projection screens of the ten neighbor worlds, and Old Guo’s Pioneer Noodle Stand #1.
Along the three-mile staging plaza at the northern rim of the crater, 100,000 elite Furnace-Blood Pioneers—picked from ten million eager volunteers across all four continents and oceans—were marching briskly through the golden turnstiles and lining up in neat square formations with their toolkits on their backs!
